China’s world models are benefiting from early integration with the country’s strong industrial base, which gives the domestic ecosystem greater momentum than that of the US, according to an executive at a leading Chinese world model start-up.

World models simulate 3D environments and physical dynamics, and are expected to help train the next generation of physical artificial intelligence applications, including robots and autonomous vehicles.

Wang Xiaofeng, an algorithm partner at GigaAI, said Chinese world models were increasingly being deployed in industrial and governmental applications, while their US counterparts were focusing more on AI-assisted gaming and design.

The Beijing-based start-up’s latest world model, GigaWorld-1, outperformed models from Google and Nvidia across visual quality, physics adherence and 3D accuracy, according to WorldArena, an industry benchmark that evaluates the capabilities of world models.

Wang, a PhD graduate from the Institute of Automation at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who led research and development of GigaWorld models, said China held an advantage over the US in developing breakthroughs because of its abundance of real-world data.

“What the embodied intelligence field lacks right now is large-scale, structured data,” he said. “China’s advantage lies in its extensive industrial scenarios and the ability of government-led platforms to organise data collection at scale, creating a more comprehensive data source to support robotics development.”